西⽅⽂化简介英⽂版
An Introduction to Western Civilization/Culture
What is civilization?
The word civilization comes from the Latin civilis, meaning civil, related to the Latin civis, meaning citizen, and civitas, meaning city or city-state. Adjectives such as English "civility" developed from this origin.
What is Culture?
From the Latin cultura, from cultus, meaning to till (the land), to cultivate, to worship, the Latin origin indicates that our civilization and culture is not something new but something that has grown over time.
The dictionary definition of culture is, “the arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation.” Western culture is a mixture of “arts, customs, and habits” that have formed over a period of more than 2,000 years.
All across Europe, in England, Germany, Italy, and Poland, we can find different civilizations and cultures,
but they all come from shared origins, most characteristics of civilization and culture come from a combination of firstly, the civilization and culture of ancient Greece. This was incorporated in and further developed by the Greco-Romans, but as Rome was falling, Judeo Christian civilization further developed Western culture.
The last major building block in Western Civilization and Culture came with the Germanic Franks in and around 300 –
400AD.
In this course we will look at the development of the civilization and cultures into what can be called a Western heritage. Whilst Ancient Greece is usually considered the foundational civilization and culture of Europe, we will first have a brief look at the preceding civilization and cultures that gave the Greeks their start.
The Origin of Greek Civilization
Around 3000 years before the greatest era of Greek history, civilizations flourished in the area of Mesopotamia (modern Iran and Iraq) and in Egypt. It was between 4000-3000 B.C., that the first cities
appeared in the region around the great rivers the Tigris [‘ta?ɡr?s] and Euphrates [ju:?freiti:z]. The first major advances of these civilizations were the use of the wheel.
By 3000 B.C., Mesopotamian civilization had made contact with other civilization and cultures of what was known as the Fertile Crescent in the region. An extensive trade network connecting Mesopotamia with the rest of Ancient Western Asia then developed.
The achievements of Mesopotamian civilization were numerous. Agriculture, thanks to the development of irrigation, became the main method of living. Farming further flourished after the invention of the plow.
As agriculture became more productive, it allowed men to give up working the land and begin their own trades, for example, metalwork or pottery. Between 3000 and 2900 B.C. craft specialization and industries began to emerge which encouraged the growth of cities, all of this led to the first major civilizations of the region.
The Sumerians, who inhabited southern Mesopotamia from 3000-2000 B.C., are thought to have been the first civilization and culture to develop non-pictographic (in picture form) writing. Originally, Sumerian writing was pictographic, that is, scribes drew pictures of representations of objects.
This proved awkward and the characters were gradually simplified and gave way to conventional signs that represented ideas.
The greatest achievement of Sumerian civilization was their cuneiform [?kju:n?f?:m] (wedge-shaped) system of writing, using a reed stylus they made wedge-shaped impressions on wet clay tablets which were then put in the sun to dry. The most common cuneiform tablets record transactions of daily life; counts of cattle kept by herdsmen for their owners, production figures, lists of taxes, accounts, contracts and other parts of organizational life in the community.
Another category of cuneiform writing included a large number of basic texts, which were used for the purpose of teaching future generations of scribes. By 2500 B.C. there were schools built just for this purpose, and the Sumerian cuneiform writing was to provide the model for the Greeks when they developed their own written language.
archaicAround 1780 B.C. the city of Babylon gained power over Mesopotamia through their ruler, Hammurabi. He was a very efficient ruler, giving the region stability after turbulent times, and transforming it into the central power of Mesopotamia.
A great literary revival followed Babylonian independence. One of the most important works of this era
of Babylon was the writing of the first known code of laws called the ‘Code of Hammurabi.’ It focused on theft, farming (or shepherding), property damage, women’s righ ts, marriage rights, children’s rights, slave rights, murder, death, and injury. The punishment is different for different classes of offenders and victims.
The city of Babylon also features in the Judeo Christian tradition. A story in the Bible is used by Jews and Christians to explain the existence of many different languages and races in the world. According to the biblical book of Genesis 11, at Babylon, humanity began building a ‘Tower of Babel’ in order to reach heaven and gain access to heaven directly from earth without the need of God. To prevent the project from succeeding, God made all the workers speak different new languages so that they could no longer communicate with one another and the work could not proceed, after that time, the people moved away to different parts of Earth, and spoke the different languages they had been given by God.
From this story, and the city of Babylon, comes the modern English word babble, or talk in a confusing way. It is also due to the Babylonians that we have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. The mathematicians of Babylonia devised a system of counting based on the number 60, from which we get the number of seconds in a minute and of minutes in an hour and the number of degrees (60×6
=360) in a circle. Mesopotamia ceased to be a major power after the conquest by Alexander the Great around 400 B.C.
While the Sumerians and other groups were busy creating a Mesopotamian civilization, another civilization had appeared to the west. This civilization depended entirely on geography; it was the fertile valley of the Nile River that allowed Egyptian civilization to flourish over the course of many centuries.
The art and science of engineering was greatly developed in Egypt, with their skill in surveying allowing them to accurately determine the position of points and the distances between them. These skills were used to outline the bases of the best known images of Ancient Egypt, the pyramids. The first pyramids, built around 2900 B.C., were little more than mud-brick structures, but the greatest building achievements in Egypt were the great pyramids of Giza, built more than 4500 years ago. The early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt certainly could build pyramids, irrigation canals and pottery wheels, and develop cuneiform writing. They are not, however, considered the foundation of civilization and culture of Europe. Although civilization developed in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, it was in the civilizations bordering the Mediterranean that Western civilization and culture was truly born. It is the civilization and culture of Ancient Greece that is today seen as being the
origin of Western civilization and culture.
Ancient Greece is considered by most historians to be the foundational civilization and culture of Western civilization. Ancient Greek civilization has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, art and architecture of the modern Western world.
The period of Greek domination of the Mediterranean world lasted approximately 1,500 years from around 1600 BC until the coming of the Roman Empire, it should be noted, that we should not consider it to be one long uninterrupted rule, or that the Greeks were one group.
The History of Greek Civilization
Aegean Civilization
3000-1450BC Minoan Civilization
2000BC People from Mycenae went to Greece
1600-1200BC Mycenae Civilization Ruled Greece
1200-800BC Dark Period for Greece
800-490BC The Archaic Period
490-336BC The Classical Period
336-30BC The Hellenistic Period
146BC Greece was incorporated into Rome
The Rise and fall of Mycenaean Power
At the height of its power, it was prosperous and active. They enlarged their cities, expanded their trade and sacked Troy. It was gone in 1100BC after the Troy War. The period from 1600 BC to about 1100 BC is known as Mycenaean [maisi?ni:?n] Greece after the major city of the period Mycenae.
The age of Mycenae has given us the epic poem that has had a profound effect on the body of western literature and art. Transmitted to us through the Romans, the Renaissance and the following generations, this is the work of one author, the man who gave us the story about Troy.
The period from which the story came, Mycenaean Greece, ended around 1100 BC, and the period from 1100 BC to around 800 BC is a ‘dark age’ of which little is known. In 800 BC Greece began to em
erge from these Dark Ages, and at this time a written record begins to appear. This is the period most consider Classical Greece, but in those days there was no such political unit known as Greece. Greek geography, where every island, valley and plain is cut off from its neighbours by the sea or mountain ranges, dictated that Greece was divided into many small self-governing city communities.

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